


the circle game

by WitchoftheWaste



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Depressed Victor Nikiforov, Drabble, Fluff and Angst, Grand Prix Final Banquet, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, angst angst angst, basically just Victor is not in a good place, he is a lonely little child, someone look after him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-11 22:12:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11723628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WitchoftheWaste/pseuds/WitchoftheWaste
Summary: Victor was twenty-six. He had just won another gold medal in the world championships. And he had just realised he would never recapture that feeling he remembered experiencing as a sixteen-year-old skater. The competition highs were getting lower and lower emotionally, even as the scores got higher and higher.Victor is really depressed about the things he has sacrificed for his career, but someone makes him smile again.





	the circle game

**Author's Note:**

> The song in the title and at the beginning of this fic is The Circle Game by Joni Mitchell. I recommend listening to it while you read this fic, or you could try Puff the Magic Dragon by Peter, Paul and Mary. They both work pretty well.
> 
> This is barely proofread and not beta'd, so I'm guessing there are mistakes. _Please_ point them out!

_And the seasons they go round and round_  
_And the painted ponies go up and down_  
_We're captive on the carousel of time_  
_We can't return we can only look behind_  
_From where we came_  
_And go round and round and round_  
_In the circle game_

Victor stood looking out of his hotel window. It was the kind that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, so he felt he might fall out of it at any moment. He could hear the cars passing, the occasional incomprehensible shout in a language he barely understood and that all pervasive sound of people moving garbage that seemed to come with every hotel room. It was around six in the morning and he was supposed to go on his morning run in a few minutes. They were flying back to St Petersburg tonight, and Victor was already longing for the familiar musty smell of his apartment and the feel of Makkachin's fur against his cheek. But at that moment, he felt as though he was standing on the edge of a precipice and there was no Makka and no ice skating and no professional smile that could stop him from falling.  

Victor was twenty-six. He had just won another gold medal in the world championships. And he had just realised he would never recapture that feeling he remembered experiencing as a sixteen-year-old skater. The competition highs were getting lower and lower emotionally, even as the scores got higher and higher.

Once when Victor was seven, he heard a character on American tv say, 'Fake it till you make it'. He didn't understand it at the time, only just starting to grasp the twisting soft sounds and unfamiliar alphabet of English, but he asked his mother, feeling with absolute certainty that she would have the answer. 

She had smiled down at him and answered, 'It means pretending to do something or be something until you succeed in becoming like that. You know, like I do sometimes when I'm nervous, but I pretend not to be.' She gave him her secret smile, mouth curving into a heart-shape. Later, when he became more preoccupied with his looks, he would anxiously see his own smile on his mother's face, but in that moment he all he did was wonder that his capable mother could ever be nervous. And yet, as she started to pull at the ends of his hair and mutter about a haircut, he remembered her tired, careworn face when she began to cook dinner every night, feet shuffling around their tiny kitchen, and her tight grip on his hand when they walked down the bare, cold streets of the newly renamed St Petersburg.  

Now that he was older, Victor understood why the brave, quiet woman who spent most of her life in Leningrad might have had things to hide. And he found that the half understood American phrase had become his lifeline, the pathetically thin cobweb he clung onto no matter what. 

His whole life was a fake. From the smile and wink he offered the cameras, to his smooth way of speaking English. Sometimes even his personal life was a fake. He took his rink mate, Mila, out for drinks where he knew the largest number of journalists and photographers would be lurking. He was Victor Nikiforov, world class skater, occasional underwear model and Cosmopolitan's sixth sexiest athlete of 2014. He didn't have feelings or opinions, just an arsenal of easygoing sentences that weren't too hard to pronounce or too difficult for people who had no knowledge of skating to understand. 

If there was a boy called Vitya who slept in a ratty t-shirt while cuddling a poodle rather than naked with a Swedish model and liked dancing to disco in his kitchen rather than dining out, then Victor Nikiforov could shut him in his apartment and pretend he wasn't there most of the time. Because it was worth all the awkward interviews and all the creepy twitter messages, it was even worth the people who stopped him when he just wanted to walk to the local supermarket or the girls who pulled out his shoelaces in crowds for mementos; it was worth every second, because he got to skate. He could fly across the ice, completely alone, completely at peace, and then he could be just Vitya again. He would sacrifice anything, all the normal happiness in the world, to enjoy that feeling of satisfaction when he perfectly nailed a quad flip or the way he felt his heart lift and his body seem to lighten as he tilted back into an Ina Bauer. He even loved the blisters and the ache in his legs from practice. He loved the rush of euphoria, the rush of power that made him feel invincible in competition. It only lasted a moment, but it was the most perfect moment and one he was always trying to recapture. That brief high; it was addictive, pushing him to work harder, practice more, add more quads, stretch harder, choreograph stronger routines. Always more. Whatever it took. 

His phone bleeped with a text from Yakov, pulling him back into the moment. He didn't bother to read it, but it did remind him that he was supposed to have started his run. _Don't slack off, Victor, or you'll never get to be free on the ice again, and you'll disappoint all those people._ His first, instinctive thought came quickly, before he realised it was wrong, outdated, made obsolete by this season's discovery. He would never be free on the ice again anyway. Somewhere in his career, buried among all the medals, the teenage boy he had been, the one who grinned the second he touched the ice, had slipped away from him. And what did he have left? 

He remembered playing in the snow as a child, and his mother combing the chunks of ice and dirt out of his hair. He remembered how the boy who lived next door, Kolya, and he had played pretend that a dragon lived at the end of the street. They had been scared to play in the street for too long, even Petersburg had a few roaming night gangs like Moscow, but the dragon at the end of the street was there to protect them. In return, they had brought him bits of string and candle stumps or shiny empty crisp packets from the treasure troves of garbage bins. The dragon was a commonplace thing after a while. Even his parents knew what he meant when he said he was 'going to see the dragon'. It guarded them and offered to fly them out of Russia and around the world. But Kolya moved away and Victor started spending every day at the rink. Looking back, he had thought he had grown up around then, taken some adult responsibility, but now, as he clutched his arm so hard it hurt, he realised he much as well have slit that dragon's throat with his skates. 

Victor looked at his reflection in the tall hotel window and resisted the urge to punch it. A small part of him was still looking critically at himself, wondering if he needed to change his hairstyle again to keep fans interested, but a tear slid down his cheek and muted that side of him for a moment. If he had abandoned the dragon, said goodbye to Kolya, only just kept in touch with his parents, what other parts of himself had disappeared and died in the past twenty years? He had been so desperate to escape the tiny flat he'd grown up in and so determined not to be tired and sad like his parents were; he had sacrificed so much to spend those crucial minutes as king of the ice in a costume that sparkled like frost. What had he lost to do it? Had it been worth it?  

He knew the answer to that.  

Why wasn't it worth it? Why didn't he feel the same as he had five or ten years ago? When he skated now, he was so aware of the thousands of eyes watching him, expecting something specific from him. Did that explain the emptiness he felt inside now? Was that a good enough explanation? He'd got to the top. Where else was there to go? Another world record? Another gold medal? He'd given everything to skating. His mind and heart were empty and didn't have anything left to give.  

He tried smiling at his reflection. It looked tired and professional, completely fake. Deliberately, he thought about Makka and the face he made when Victor rubbed his tummy, and for a moment the smile changed and became wider, rounder, wrinkling his nose. But then, with Victor helpless to stop it, the smile changed back. It was the same fake one again. He thought his face might crack in two with the force of that disgusting, fake smile. 

He went on the run. He got in the shower. He towel dried his hair so hard it burned his scalp and looked in the mirror again. He concealed the dark circles under his eyes with a bit of foundation. One more year, just one more. He was getting old; no one would want him after another year. He could do one more year. He could smile, he could laugh, he could talk, he could  _skate skate skate._

 

* * *

 

In the next season, Victor almost used the emptiness he felt to his own advantage. _Stammi Vicino_ was the closest he could come to expressing some of how he felt. He didn't know if that was meant to be therapeutic or if he had become so jaded and mercenary that he could use his most unhappy and private feelings as a key to further success. He didn't really want to think about it. 

He skated and he smiled and he won. 

And afterwards, at the banquet, the Japanese skater who had placed sixth in the Grand Prix Final smiled at him and danced with him and held him. It didn't matter that the man was clearly drunk, what mattered was the unfamiliar warmth that spread in Victor's chest when he smiled. What mattered was the smile Victor gave him back, so huge it hurt his cheeks, not false and controlled but _real._ What mattered was the way his heart pounded in his chest and his head swam when the skater touched him. 

The skater's name was Yuuri and he was the first real thing Victor had seen in years. 

As he swooped Victor down into yet another pose, Yuuri whispered in his ear, 'You look sad when you skate. Please don't look sad anymore.' Victor felt the blood pounding in his ears. Someone had noticed. This amazing, fascinating, confusing man knew. He had failed. 

Yuuri pulled back to look at him seriously. His brown eyes looked so soft. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'I won't let you be sad.' And then he threw his arms around Victor's neck. 

It was absurd. If someone told Victor not to worry, it made him worry twice as much. But the tears pricking behind Victor's ears felt like a relief, and Yuuri's arms around him felt like an anchor. So he hugged Yuuri back, gripping at the back of Yuuri's dress shirt so hard his hands hurt.

The next morning, Victor's head pounded with a hangover headache and his mouth felt like something had crawled into it and died. But his smile was genuine with the memory of Yuuri's eyes and hands and mouth.

_Be my coach, Victor!_

The smile grew wider.

 

**Author's Note:**

> So I have been on and off writing one short piece of porn for Victor and Yuuri since before Christmas (I know I'm terrible), but I rattled this piece of angsty bullshit off in the space of one afternoon? No, I don't understand and I can't explain. The smut will be coming (pun intended) eventually, I promise.
> 
> I cried while writing this, so sympathy kudos and comments will be very much appreciated!


End file.
